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The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon from the Beginning. By Jerome Clark. 2 vols. 2nd edn. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1998. 1,180pp. 100 illus. $140 (hbk). ISBN 0-7808-0097-4
The UFO phenomenon is undoubtedly the most widespread and culturally embedded supernatural belief system to emerge in the Western world during the latter half of the twentieth century. Although reports of strange flying objects in the sky have been recorded from the dawn of human history, it was the sighting by American pilot Kenneth Arnold in 1947 which sparked the current craze for seeing "flying saucers." Days later, the foundations of today's UFO beliefs were further prepared by a report that the U.S. army had captured a "flying disc" which had crashed on a ranch in Roswell, New Mexico. The Roswell story was carried by newspapers across the world, but had little impact upon a society preoccupied with down-to-earth post-war matters. Thirty years later, it was resurrected when belief in extraterrestrial visitations had replaced the Cold War anxieties of the past.
Although initially largely an American obsession, in the 1950s flying saucers caught the imagination of a world in which jet aircraft and rockets were soon to put mankind into space and so inevitably provoke speculation about extraterrestrial life. If we could visit space, then was it possible that the strange objects spotted in the sky were the craft of aliens who were returning the compliment? This so-called Extra Terrestrial Hypothesis is now accepted as fact by thousands of UFO believers across the world. Today, this belief is so widespread and ingrained that it is difficult to discuss UFOs outside of an "alien" context, a problem which has dogged many attempts at...